At Friedman Benda in New York, French designer Ferréol Babin’s first solo exhibition opened on an unexpected rainy night. Titled In a Landscape, the show brings together a series of cabinets, chairs and smaller objects crafted from wood near the French countryside surrounding Babin’s studio. These pieces carry handcrafted textures and painted fragments of abstracted terrain defined by fields, skies, whimsical birds and grass-covered stones. All together, these simple additions to Babin’s craftsmanship turn the furniture into something close to a painted memory of a place.

For Babin, the idea of adding painting to his furniture is less a departure than a return. Long before he began working in furniture, painting shaped his earliest relationship with making. Talking to STIR on the exhibition’s opening night, Babin recalled, “When I was six years old, my parents put me in a painting and sculpture class. The same teacher guided me until my early twenties, teaching me how to work with colour, lines and composition. Since I was very young, I thought I wanted to be a painter.”

Architecture briefly interrupted that trajectory. As a young student, Babin thought he would become an architect and work at the scale of buildings. But he soon felt frustrated because it takes a long time for architectural ideas to become real buildings. “Architecture was too big, too slow,” he added. “I couldn’t shape things with my hands as much as I expected.” The search for a more tactile practice led him to product design and, eventually, to Japan. His time there proved formative, particularly in regard to its deep cultural relationship with craft. In workshops and studios, Babin encountered a level of attention given to tools and hand processes that reshaped how he thought about design. “They [Japanese] have a very strong connection to craftsmanship. The tools themselves are treated with care because they allow you to achieve a very precise result,” Babin shares. This experience followed him back to France, where he gradually moved away from conventional industrial design and towards a more independent practice in his own workshop.

The shift from designing objects digitally to making them directly became central to his work. Babin describes the transition almost as a rediscovery of play. Alone in the studio, surrounded by wood and hand tools, the process became less about solving a brief and more about experimentation; carving, breaking, correcting mistakes and learning from them. At first glance, the pieces read as furniture, but the small paintings on their surfaces place them somewhere between sculpture and painting. Babin’s cabinets and benches retain the proportions of usable furniture, while their surfaces carry painted scenes of suggestive landscapes. A cabinet holds a small patch of blue sky across one door and another, a sloping green field. The compositions are almost restrained in little rectangles, as if peeking through a window overlooking the French countryside.

The paintings introduce another layer to Babin’s long-standing association with wood. What once ended with carving and finishing now continues with colour. Babin describes this moment as a small conceptual leap. “For a long time, I thought the furniture was finished once the surface was complete. But suddenly I realised that what I thought was finished could actually be the beginning of something else. It’s like a child painting on the wall of his bedroom,” he says with a laugh.

The countryside around his studio appears everywhere in the work. Babin’s workshop is located in the countryside, where seasonal changes and everyday observations, such as flowers growing, birds appearing and light shifting across fields, feed directly into his work. This connection also explains the quiet playfulness in the exhibition. A personal favourite is a wooden chair with a dramatically long back, almost identical to a ladder. On top of the back is a small carved bird. Talking about which, Babin says, “You want to climb on it, to touch it or maybe you don't want to make too much noise because the bird will fly.” He further argues that adults tend to impose limits on themselves and on their work. His aim is to resist those boundaries and preserve the freedom of experimentation.

Despite the variety of forms and gestures across the show, the pieces share a common sensibility. Babin describes his practice as a language built through making: the repeated interaction between hands, tools, materials and life around him. Each object may look different, but they belong to the same family. “When I am in the workshop, it’s just me, the tools and the wood. I’m speaking through the act of making,” he says. In a Landscape suggests that furniture can hold more than function. It can carry traces of place, fragments of observation, and the ongoing dialogue between the maker and what gets made.

‘In The Landscape’ runs from March 6 – April 18, 2026, at Friedman Benda, New York.